John Spaight said, “They look like alligators with wings.”

“You wait till you see them in the air. That B-Seventeen’s the best combat aircraft ever built.” Johnson came down the four metal steps eagerly and all but plucked at Alex’s sleeve. “Those for us?”

“Yes.”

“You mean it? All six of them?”

“That’s our Air Corps.”

Johnson stared at the three majestic aircraft with disbelieving awe. They dwarfed the Dakota transports beside them. “You do know how to make a man happy, Skipper.”

Alex saw John Spaight wince. The two Secret Service men came down onto the concrete and Alex said, “This is where we leave you two.”

“Not until you’re airborne, General. That’s the orders.”

A civilian DC-3 was taking off, lifting and turning toward the south, beating up through a patchwork of clouds that hung out over Cape Cod Bay. Spaight said, “Let’s don’t gawk all day, Captain.” He prodded Johnson’s elbow and the five of them walked into the terminal.

An officious Army major had all the paperwork laid out in the airport ops room. Alex had to put his signature on a dozen documents. The major kept talking in a clipped angry voice: “I’m not sure where you gentlemen get your drag but that’s nearly a million and a half dollars’ worth of airplanes. Every air squadron in the country’s screaming for up-to-date bombers and the War Department in its wisdom decides to send these to goddamn England. Okay, I’ve put up six copilots and six flight engineers and five pilots out of the Ferrying Command pool-I gather one of you gentlemen will be lead pilot on the formation?”

“Me,” Pappy Johnson said.

The major’s acidulous attention flicked across him. “You’d better meet your crews then-Mister…?”

“Colonel,” Alex lied gently. “Colonel Johnson.”

The major didn’t turn a hair. “Okay then Colonel. They’ll want you to file a flight plan upstairs while you’re at it-but meet your crews first.”

Johnson ducked out of the room and the round-shouldered major came back to the desk and glanced through the papers Alex had signed. “I supposed it’s all in order. But it’s understood that you people are personally responsible for these aircraft. It’s damned irregular.” He turned stiffly past Alex and around behind the desk; reached forward and stacked the signed documents neatly. Finally he said, “Just take care of those Flying Forts. We haven’t got a whole lot of them to spare.”

They waited in a private lounge behind the ticket counters. The two Secret Service men drank coffee and read newspapers. Spaight was smoking a cigarette. “Alex, you can’t just leave me in midair with my ass upside down.”

“I can’t make exceptions. I’m sorry.”

“Then you’ll have a lot of people indulging in speculations. Putting the pieces together I come up with a bombing attack on the Kremlin. Is that the plan?”

“No. That would wipe out some artwork and a few upstairs flunkies.”

“Then I don’t follow it. How can you get at Stalin from the air?”

“I’m sorry John. It’s on a need-to-know basis.”

“You’re a pill, you know that?”

“Yes.”

Johnson came in wearing a flattened Mae West over his flight jacket. It was a leather jacket with a big mustard fur collar lying open across his shoulders. Under the straps of the life jacket his pilot’s wings could be seen. He tramped his lambskin-lined boots against the floor and beamed through his sweat. “Let’s get some altitude before I swelter to death.”

Spaight stubbed out his cigarette; Alex reached for his grip.

Pappy Johnson said, “Thanks for that impromptu promotion.”

“I’ll see if I can make it stick.”

“No need. I don’t care that much about rank-I fly airplanes is what I do.” He pivoted toward the door, talking over his shoulder: “We’ll refuel at Gander, be in Inverness tomorrow afternoon. Coffee and sandwiches on board. You’ll have to ride the nose seats in my plane-those Dakotas are jammed with stinking big crates of stuff, they took all the seats out. All that junk belong to us?”

“That and more coming by convoy,” Alex said.

The Secret Service guards went outside ahead of him. When he came through the doorway something chipped splinters out of the jamb beside him and something whacked his thigh like a sharp small hammer and then he was down and sliding.

4

He caromed against the backs of the Secret Service man’s legs; the man went down and his automatic pistol fell from his hand. His partner was down on one knee with his pistol extended at arm’s length, looking for a target.

Spaight and Pappy Johnson went belly-flat on the pavement. There was no cover except back through the doorway and the sniper had that zeroed in. He was somewhere across the runway in the tangle of scrub; there was a road beyond that, parallel to the runway, and then the Bay.

The guard was scrambling for his dislodged gun but it was close to Alex’s hand and he picked it up by instinct because it was there: he put four fast shots into the scrub a hundred yards away, spraying from left to right, not because he expected to hit anything but because he wanted to rattle the sniper and throw off his aim. The. 38 automatic bucked mildly against his palm, slipping on the sweat. He couldn’t see where the bullets went; he hadn’t expected to.

The other guard was sprinting left, breaking and zigzagging, angling toward the litter of weeds and shoulder-high scrub. It was probably his run that flushed the sniper: there was a quick crashing in the brush and then it all went still. The running guard was halfway across the runway and still zigzagging; the first man was drawling in Alex’s ear, “You all right sir?” and reaching for his pistol. Alex handed it to him.

They heard the roar of an automobile and the sickening grind when its gears jammed into first; the screech of tires and then Alex had a glimpse of the moving black roof of the car. The guard beside him fired the last two out of his pistol and went into his pocket for a new magazine. His partner was pounding into the scrub across the field but the car had gathered speed; it wheeled inland to be absorbed into the Boston traffic.

“Shee-yit,” said Pappy Johnson.

It took five hours and a telephone call to Washington before the Boston police allowed them to take off and even then all of them had to sign affidavits. A nervous doctor wanted to put Alex into hospital for observation but he managed to veto that. A big splinter from the doorjamb had gone straight through the fleshy outer part of his right thigh, drilling a subcutaneous tunnel and shredding the skin on the way out; the doctor ran an alcohol swab clear through it to cauterize the wound and taped it up with heavy bandaging. It hadn’t bled much; there weren’t many blood vessels in that part of the anatomy. Nor were there many nerves. A muscle had been frayed. It was more stiff than painful when he moved it.

The doctor said, “Best thing to do is sit on it. Tourniquet effect. Wad something up and put it under the bandage. Move it every ten minutes or so. An hour or so you’ll go into minor shock-don’t worry about it if you spend the next twelve hours asleep. But keep as warm as you can. Have you got heat in that plane?”

Pappy Johnson said, “No. We’ll be using electrically heated flying suits.”

“Set his up as high as it’ll go.”

They had dug the bullet out of the wall inside. It was a jacketed. 30’06-the standard hunting and military caliber; they’d been sold by the millions in war-surplus ever since 1919. The police were sending it to the FBI lab along with whatever other clues their technicians had discovered in the sniper’s shooting position but that was seacoast sand and it hadn’t held footprints or tire tracks. They weren’t going to learn anything.

It was still daylight when they drove him down the runway to the hardstands. Pappy Johnson chinned himself up into the forward hatch of the leading B-17 and reached down for the luggage and then Spaight was boosting Alex up inside the cramped forward cabin of the bomber. He had to go under the pilots’ seats into the Plexiglas nose of the plane where the bombardier and navigator usually sat. It was a matter of picking a path across a tangle of boxes and cables and fire extinguishers and the exposed inner structurings of the airplane. Spaight gripped his elbow but Alex said, “All right, I can walk,” and climbed forward slowly; he’d been injured enough times to respect the practicalities.